MR3 Part Too Late: the devil wears lancome

Firstly, as a non-manga-reader undergoing continuing education in these blog series, I want to agree with Tom that the Okazaki’s artwork shocked and thrilled me at first glance. Her art looks more gestural than any other manga I’ve seen, and the thickish lines and largish facial features were much more relatable, for me, than the pin-thin perfect lines i’m used to seeing from our eastern brethren.

When manga characters elsewhere are composed so meticulously and in such delicate detail, it seems weird that their faces and bodies look all flat, whereas here, the flatness is right, cause they’re just shorthand sketches (I think it’s an important connection Tom makes to Andy Warhol: these characters strongly suggest 50s American gag and advertisement cartooning, which is a lot of why they felt so warmly familiar).

Of course, after the initial glow of recognition, Helter Skelter gave me the same problems I’ve had with most manga, namely the diffuculty of telling characters apart and the difficulty of distinguishing men from women. At first, I thought the makeup artist and the ingenue personal assistant turned sex slave turned hitwoman were different people, then I thought they were the same person, then at the end of the book I again thought that they were two people, and the makeup artist was in fact a man (reading Nana I learned to check for neck girth to determine a character’s sex, here that doesn’t work). But, I am still an outsider to the art form, and people have said my characters are hard to tell apart, so.

Like Noah and Tom, divasploitation doesn’t read as particularly feminist to me, or particularly new. Okazaki does a lot of telling-not-showing, in the form of the voiceovers, the quotations, and then the burning-tiger lsd scenes, that she’s getting at something bigger, deeper, more meta, but that part never really intrudes on the divasploitation enough to matter.

It’s funny, though, and probably telling of our different gender-coloured perspectives, that I had a different conviction from my co-utilitarians of where this awfully tired and predictable story was going.

Tom says, “Hana was there to be a doormat and let us see what a beast Ririko was. The cop was there to delve into the dark doings behind Ririko’s creation, to bring about justice at the end of the story, and in the meantime to give us some relief from Ririko’s twisted bitchiness and that of her milieu.” Cause I was sure that the cop was just an expositional device and a looming threat, whereas Helter Skelter would really be Hana’s story, the old “innocent, better-than-that girl is tempted by shallow beauty & riches, almost succumbs, but manages to triumphantly turn her back on it in the end” (hence my title). I really thought that’s where the Lancome-loaning scene, in particular, was going. (“No, Hana! She’ll get you hooked on the devil makeup!”)

But even though Ririko does talk about harming other people because she has been harmed, and refers to Hana in that context, she never actually harms Hana in the same way that she herself had been harmed. The makeup scene is actually just about Ririko’s bait-and-switch affections; Hana never gets designer clothes or a makeover, let alone surgery (Ririko encourages her sister to get surgery, but it reads as misguided empathy rather than cruelty). She uses Hana for nonconsensual but mutually enjoyable sex slavery, and for inappropriate errands up to and including grevious assault, but she never tries to remake Hana in her own image.

But that’s exactly what our conquering hero, the detective, does to Ririko. He renames her (it’s interesting how men in literature who set out to objectify, remake and possess a woman often start with assigning her a new name… was Lolita the first or just the most famous example?), stalks her all over and announces they were feathers together in a past life, before (as Noah so powerfully pointed out) tearing down her whole life, ruining her body’s chances of survival, and leaving her no recourse.

He’s as bad as “Mom,” maybe worse, because he’s an outsider who gets to lecture smugly as he objectifies, rather than being down in the beauty trenches (“Mom” reveals offhand that she’s surgically generated herself, so she is harming Ririko exactly as she was harmed). This is a feminist parable?? (This isn’t really undone by the darkly happy-ending epilogue, which goes against all the established rules about the sinister abortion surgery.)

Sigh. I might as well conclude with some more clueless-outsider bitching about manga. Okazaki pays lip service to it’s-bad-to-starve-yourself-to-get-supermodel-thin, but then every default female character has the same figure as Ririko, minus the breast implants and a couple of inches of height. Why aren’t we concerned about how all of them, by extension, are starving themselves? All the highschool girls we occasionally cut to, absorbing bad values from their fashion magazines, already look like fashion models (the only women with any fat on them, are the women whose fat is integral to the plot). That’s what happens when you draw a whole world in fashion illustration style, and that’s what all shonen and josei manga i’ve ever seen does.

Also, how every woman shown having sex has to explain at least once that she’s Not Really Into This Sort of Thing. Maybe it’s the innocent 50s romance referred to in comments, back before they discovered the female sex drive, or maybe it’s just another culture’s gender norms, which who-am-i-to-say are more fucked up than ours, but the good girl who has to be coerced is so not a turn-on for me. (That was one of my favourite things about Nana, even though it has the fashion-illustration crap in spades: it seemed to not share the above sexual hang-up at all. The good-girl-naif is actually shown to be pretty promiscuous in high school, and it’s just not a thing.)

23 Comments

I can’t remember if I said this or not in my post…but yeah, I definitely was thinking/hoping there’d be more done with Hada.

I see what you’re saying about body types in manga…but it is true that the guys are all excessively skinny as well. Which leads me to wonder if rates of anorexia among men and women are comparable in Japan, or at least more evenly balanced than they are here…?

1) We both like the art, but I guess we disagree about why we like it. Man, I hate those faces.

2) There’s Hada the gofer (girl, earrings) and Sawanabe Kinji (guy, no earrings). I had to go back and look at the characters hard before arriving at this conclusions, which I admit is a bullshit thing to make a reader do. FWIW I reckon Kinji is gay since Ririko doesn’t try to make things all sexual with him.

3) Did Hada say she didn’t like sex? I don’t remember that. It seemed more like she enjoyed psycho erotic games w/Ririko a lot more than she did conventional sex with her boyfriend. That wouldn’t be a good-girl thing. Of course Ririko says she doesn’t like sex, but she’s fucked up.

4) I think it’s pretty hard to judge about Asada (the cop) because this psychic connection/past life business is such a wild card. I mean, the book does make a point of having the two characters share the same dream. That strongly suggests the reincarnation business isn’t a stalker fantasy but the actual truth. Which would at least raise the possibility that Asada isn’t renaming Ririko, just revealing the name she had in their shared past lie. Or some damn thing.

5) Let me see, about bringing her life down. I got muddled on the plot, so I guess this point depends on whether the clinic’s patients were supposed to know that the treatments automatically degraded and needed constant retouching. I’m not going to go back to check, so the hell with it.

A key underlying point, I suppose, is that you and Noah don’t like the idea of a story where the male protagonist decides how the female should be leading her life. So now I have to caveat what I said in the last paragraph. Because even if the clinic really was a fully criminal operation, that would just mean the author had rigged things so that the male character had a good cover story for deciding how the female should live.

If I’ve got you guys right, I can see why that would bother you, and I’m kind of surprised that it doesn’t bother me. Instead I’m quite comfortable with the story working out that way and didn’t even notice the principle being enacted. Oh shoot. Well, it goes to show.

6) What you say about the girls all being thin gets to the doublegame that I dislike about the whole “oh, that shallow hot girl” approach to lookism. If the people who turn out and consumed this sort of product really believed what they said, the genre wouldn’t exist. Instead we’d have a lot of stories about regular-looking people.

“4) I think it’s pretty hard to judge about Asada (the cop) because this psychic connection/past life business is such a wild card. I mean, the book does make a point of having the two characters share the same dream. That strongly suggests the reincarnation business isn’t a stalker fantasy but the actual truth. Which would at least raise the possibility that Asada isn’t renaming Ririko, just revealing the name she had in their shared past lie. Or some damn thing.”

The problem of course is that nothing “really” happens here; you’ve just got a story where the plot is rigged to make us think this detective is wise and psychic, rather than pointing to the obvious conclusion which is that he’s a creepy stalker.

I should add, in defense of Nabokov, that Humbert Humbert is absolutely supposed to be a moral monster, whereas I don’t think the detective here is supposed to be at all. Lolita is way more solid on feminist issues than Helter Skelter, I think.

Miriam: Her art looks more gestural than any other manga I’ve seenIou Kuroda!

Also, how every woman shown having sex has to explain at least once that she’s Not Really Into This Sort of Thing. Maybe it’s the innocent 50s romance referred to in comments, back before they discovered the female sex drive, or maybe it’s just another culture’s gender norms,In this case, don’t think it has anything to do with gender norms; I think it’s just these characters.

Tom: The Japanese tend to have skinny builds, right?More or less. Which complicates the question, “Why aren’t we concerned about how all of them, by extension, are starving themselves?” Because generally they’re just thinner.

That said, I don’t know how many times I’ve heard a pencil-thin Japanese woman say she’s on a diet.

Japanese Wikipedia says anorexia nervosa has become a problem in recent decades, and that’s it’s seen in men as well as women, but at a ratio of about 1 to 20.

To salvage point 6 in my comment, I’ll add that Hada, Kini, and Hada’s boyfriend are all rather good looking. Not a lot of uglies in the story.Isn’t that just a consequence of using a spare art style?

there isn't a proven link between media images & anorexia really, but it's my opinion that in the case of less severe eating disorders (casual bulimia up through inappropriate/compulsive dieting, the kind bill mentions), every little bit of "you are only worthwhile/visible if you are extremely thin," hurts. & that kind of thinking affects maybe a *majority* of young women in many places.

beyond that, yeah, it's just a style, but i would argue a style wherein it's very difficult to tell either "starving yourself to look thin is bad" stories or "don't get hung up on looks" stories.

also, i meant to imply that humbert was the man ojectifying/dominating/renaming lolita, not nabokov. i maybe shouldn't have italicized "lolita." i liked the book a lot, though it's been awhile since i've read it.

tom,

i'd find it impossible that asada doesn't know that secret-abortion-surgery withdrawal decays your body, given how much else he knows about it.

bill,

if anorexia is hitting men 1/20th of the time it's hitting women, that's very high compared to the us (where anorexia sufferers are women 90% of the time, according to what i heard recently).

everyone,

yeah, maybe i can't really defend the "women don't like sex" point. every time it happened, it made sex in context (hada's boyfriend only calls her frigid after she gets off so much on ririko's sex games; ririko seems to be at least half lying about her sexuality, which is in character for her; the briefly-seen girl doesn't want to have sex with her boyfriend because she's got secret-abortion-surgery lesions all over her), & maybe i was too quick to conflate it with other japanese stories i've read.

i’d find it impossible that asada doesn’t know that secret-abortion-surgery withdrawal decays your body, given how much else he knows about it.Well, yeah, since he’s trying to shut the place down. It’s not like there’s a law against letting people pay to become thin and hot. There might be laws against giving people medical treatments with disastrous after-effects that they don’t know about.

Notice that I said “this point depends on whether the clinic’s patients were supposed to know that the treatments automatically degraded.” Not whether Asada knew.

Hey Miriam. That all makes sense. That’s interesting about the anorexia rates with men, too.

I think you were right, actually, about the book’s inability/reluctance to imagine women desiring, or accepting their desire for, sex. Hada enjoys the sex, but that fact almost cripples her with guilt. You could work that into a feminist critique of double-standards…but instead it just ends up being used as a lever for the detective to bring Ririko down.

Yeah, it’s kind of the drug war thing. Are the cops good guys when they bust the junkies, or keep them from getting their fixes? Especially if there’s no effort to provide access to recovery clinics or methadone or anything?

Well, I wouldn’t call Asada is “evil.” It’s one thing to believe that Okazaki has chosen to tell a story that puts a man in the moral driver’s seat at the expense of the female character’s autonomy. It’s another to say that, within the terms of the story, the male character is some kind of monster because of what he’s doing. If a stream of people are getting suckered into wrecking their bodies and lives, somebody ought to keep the victimizers from roping in more victims.

But at this point I think we’d all have to review the comic for the fine points of its plot, something I doubt any of us want to do.

“Evil” is pretty strong — I mean he’s not Darkseid, obviously. I’m willing to go out on a limb and call him a creep and a slimeball, though. He appears to get off on pursuing Ririko, which is icky, and his interest in shutting down the clinic appears to be all about winning some weird game in his head with his superiors; there’s almost no evidence that he cares about what’s going to happen to the women. It’s a pretty repulsive performance, overall.

And I’d like the book a lot more if there were any indication that Okazaki thought so too. But, alas, there really doesn’t seem to be….

Miriam, the math’s reversed: 1 out of 20 is 5% of cases, half as often as the 1 out of 10 cases overall. That said, it could just go undiagnosed: Average Young Japanese Man pays a hell of a lot more attention to fashion images than Average Young American Man.

“‘Evil’ is pretty strong … I’m willing to go out on a limb and call him a creep and a slimeball, though. He appears to get off on pursuing Ririko, which is icky …”

Well, same problem as before. Within the terms of the story, his pursuit of Ririko is tied to their sharing of a past life, which would not be a stalker fantasy but, WTTOTS, a fact. If so, there goes a whole lot of the ickiness.

If there’s a really unlikable character here, WTTOTS, it would be Ririko. She is a complete screaming shithead. Next to her, I find Asada barely objectionable at all, WTTOTS.

I just don’t buy the “well, if they shared a past life, then it’s not creepy.” Even if you share past lives, you’ve got some choices. You can choose to behave like a weird creepy stalker. Or you can choose to say, “hey, we shared a past life — which doesn’t necessarily mean that in this life I need to trail around after this person like a creepy stalker.” I’m not super, super familiar with Buddhism and Japanese religious beliefs, but I don’t think that past lives give you a free pass on this live’s karma.

Ririko is clearly a nutcase, sure. I don’t know that she’s inherently more creepy than Asada, though. She’s loud and dramatic and throws acid in your face; he’s subtle and sneaky and stabs you in the back. Personally, I’d want nothing to do with either of them.

“She’s loud and dramatic and throws acid in your face; he’s subtle and sneaky and stabs you in the back.”

He doesn’t really stab people; she really throws acid. What I suspect is that the Asada subplot is such a muddle to us that we’re reacting to the story’s sexual politics and pushing those feelings onto his character. You and Miriam dislike the story’s underlying dynamics, so you have a personal dislike for Asada. I don’t mind the underlying dynamics, so I view him as the fellow investigating bad deeds and as the locus for a lot of past-lives gobbledy-gook that I haven’t processed.

I find I dislike sexism, racism, etc in a story when I feel like a character is being bullied, either by the other characters or by the author. Ririko is a bully, and the character she kicks around is another woman, so my anti-sexism reflex (such as it is) gets short-circuited.

Ririko doesn’t throw acid in anybody’s face. She has people to do that for her.

What the detective does is arguably worse than stabbing people. He sets them up so their bodies rot, and then takes credit for being noble.

I don’t feel that the subplots muddled. I mean, narratively, it’s muddled, but thematically and how the sexual politics work seem quite clear. I don’t dislike the character because I dislike the sexual politics. Rather, it’s *the character* which makes me dislike the sexual politics.

I mean, the sexual politics don’t come from nowhere; you can only read them through what the characters do and how the story works. I didn’t start out with any prejudice against Asada. It’s how he works in the story that I don’t like.

Ririko isn’t a very sympathetic character, certainly. Part of the point about it’s not being feminist is that it never really does show men bullying women, or the beauty industry as being part of a system that at all caters to, or is geared towards aggrandizing, men. Asada is a bully, I’d argue, but that isn’t an insight that the comic really encourages or thinks about.

“Ririko doesn’t throw acid in anybody’s face. She has people to do that for her.”

Come on,that’s not a difference.

“He sets them up so their bodies rot, and then takes credit for being noble.”

He didn’t set them up; they and the clinic did.

“I don’t feel that the subplots muddled. I mean, narratively, it’s muddled, but thematically and how the sexual politics work seem quite clear.”

Well, that’s the thing. The subplot is narrative; the sexual politics are the implications of the narrative. If the narrative is muddled, its implications become hard to read, except for one: a man is deciding what a woman’s life will be. As we discussed upthread, it doesn’t matter to you what the rights and wrongs of the matter are within the terms of the story; you just dislike stories that are arranged to put men in the driver’s seat at the expense of women.